Vincent threw the frightened creature off with a savage carelessness of which he was quite unconscious, and raised his mother in his arms. She had fallen back in a dreary momentary fit which was not fainting--her eyes fluttering under their half-closed lids, her lips moving with sounds that did not come. The shock had struck her as such shocks strike the mortal frame when it grows old. When sound burst at last from the moving lips, it was in a babble that mocked all her efforts to speak. But she was not unconscious of the sudden misery. Her eyes wandered about, taking in everything around her, and at last fixed upon a letter lying half-open on Susan's work-table, almost the only token of disorder or agitation in the trim little room. The first sign of revival she showed was pointing at it with a doubtful but impatient gesture. Before she could make them understand what she meant, that "quick temper" of which Mrs. Vincent accused herself blazed up in the widow's eyes. She raised herself erect out of her son's arms, and seized the paper. It was Vincent's letter to his sister, written from London after he had failed in his inquiries about Mr. Fordham. In the light of this dreadful midnight the young man himself perceived how alarming and peremptory were its brief injunctions. "Don't write to Mr. Fordham again till my mother's return; probably I shall bring her home: we have something to say to you on this subject, and in the mean time be sure you do as I tell you." Mrs. Vincent gradually recovered herself as she read this; she said it over under her breath, getting back the use of her speech. There was not much explanation in it, yet it seemed to take the place, in the mother's confused faculties, of an apology for Susan. "She was frightened," said Mrs. Vincent, slowly, with strange twitches about her lips--"she was frightened." That was all her mind could take in at once. Afterwards, minute by minute, she raised herself up, and came to self-command and composure. Only as she recovered did the truth reveal itself clearly even to Vincent, who, after the first shock, had been occupied entirely by his mother. The young man's head throbbed and tingled as if with blows. As she sat up and gazed at him with her own recovered looks, through the dim ice-cold atmosphere, lighted faintly with one candle, they both woke up to the reality of their position. The shock of the discovery was over--Susan was gone; but where, and with whom? There was still something to hope, if everything to fear. "She is gone to her aunt Alice," said Mrs. Vincent, once more looking full in the eyes of the woman who had been left in charge of the house, and who stood shivering with cold and agitation, winding and unwinding round her a thin shawl in which she had wrapped up her arms. "She has gone to her aunt Alice--she was frightened, and thought something had happened. To-morrow we can go and bring her home."